Execution Support Environment

Part 1 Interrupt system: hardware system's environment; system's interaction with the environment; interrupts and exceptions; the concept of a process; process stste transition; model of an interrupt system; actual implementations of interrupt system; examples of interrupt systems. Part 2 Process management system: process data type; process creation and process termination; process scheduling; controlling process interaction; process management in unix; parallel processes (interleaving versus true parallelism); lightweight processes (tasks and threads); process dependence graph; language constructs for process management (fork and join, parbegin and perend); parallel programming under unix multitasking environment); threads environment. Part 3 Process interaction by sharing: critical section as a communication protocol; designing a critical section - theory; designing a critical section - practice; Dekker's algorithm; general solution; lock data type (semaphores, spinlocks, events, barriers); examples; language constructs for process interaction. Part 4 Process interaction by message passing: communication monitors; communication link; direct communication; indirect communication; examples of message systems. Part 5 Memory management system - micro scheduling: memory hierarchy; objectives of a MMS; mechanisms of a MMS; base-limit registers; one level memory; virtual memory; one level memory implementation; associative memory; segmentation. Part 6 memory management system - macro scheduling: policies of memory allocation; placement policies (best fit, worst fit, first fit, coalescing, buddy system); replacement policies (optimal replacement policy, random replacement policy; first-in-first-out, lease recently used, least frequently used; clock replacement, second chance algorithm; fetch policies (on demand, anticipatory); locality principle, the working set model. Part 7 Information management system: file data type; file specification and implementation; file as the language object; file as the system object; file system; I/O management system (opem, close, DOIO operations) information management system (directory structure, user interface, command language); file system in unix.